Just kidding! Rumor now tips Oct. 23 iPad Mini launch

Oct. 10 came and went without an iPad mini invitation, but the latest rumor suggests that Apple will actually unveil the much-hyped device on Oct. 23.

Citing "people familiar with Apple's plans," All Things D this morning said Apple will hold a press event on Tuesday, Oct. 23 to unveil the iPad mini. The blog has not yet confirmed a location, but speculated that the event will be held at Apple's Cupertino campus since the company already held a big press event in San Francisco for the iPhone 5 unveiling.

Apple has not yet made any announcements.

Earlier this month, a report from Fortune said Apple would send out iPad mini invitations on Oct. 10, hold its event on Oct. 17, and start selling the new device by Nov. 2. But by the time Wednesday afternoon rolled around, invites were nowhere in site, and Fortune issued a mea culpa.

"My source was a major Apple investor who had heard it from three different sources. They were wrong about the timing," reporter Philip Elmer-Dewitt wrote. "I was wrong to pass the tip along. I don't know what I was doing in the rumor business in the first place. Mea culpa."

When it comes to Apple event rumors, All Things D has been a pretty reliable source. In August, the blog correctly reported that Apple would not unveil the iPad mini at the September iPhone 5 event. iMore.com later predicted that the iPhone 5 would be unveiled on Sept. 12. Last year, meanwhile, ATD tipped the Oct. 4 iPhone 4S launch date and the change of venue from San Francisco to Apple's campus.

Oct. 23, meanwhile, puts the iPad mini launch just three days ahead of the Windows 8 release. On that date, the Microsoft Surface tablet as well as a number of other Windows 8-based tablets are expected to hit store shelves. Can they compete against a smaller and more affordable iPad? Stay tuned.

If you can't wait, check out PCMag's roundup of the top iPad mini alternatives below, as well as some supposedly leaked images of the iPad mini.

UPDATE: Jim Dalrymple and John Gruber, both considered to be in-the-know about all things Apple, have chimed in to seemingly confirm the Oct. 23 date. Dalrymple quoted the All Things D story and issued a simple "Yep" in response, while Gruber titled his blog post "Oct. 23" and wrote: "Looks like that's when Apple is going to unveil the smaller iPad."


Source: http://www.thinkdigit.com/Tablets/Just-kidding-Rumor-now-tips-Oct-23_11048.html

To fight Apple-flight, Microsoft must hang tough on Surface

I just pray that Microsoft doesn't cave to pressure from partners to punt on Surface.

The first public plea came this week from Acer, which, in effect, begged Microsoft to drop Surface.

If that happens, Microsoft will lose the consumer to Apple for good. Probably sooner rather than later.

And if Acer is that worried about Surface, then it should out-design Microsoft or look elsewhere. Right now I don't see anything from Acer that would make me chuck my MacBook and iPad.

But Surface could. And it gets even more interesting when I see that Redmond is already working on Surface 2.

(Of course, if Microsoft isn't able to follow through with a stable, reliable finished product that lives up to the hype, all bets are off. In other words, it needs to be as good as Apple at executing.)

But whatever happens, Hewlett-Packard or Dell or Acer would never have conceived of a Windows 8 Pro Surface. It's not in their design DNA and Microsoft knows this better than anyone.

So, MS came up with a 10.6-inch, 903-gram device packing a 1,920x1,080 display (that's some pretty serious pixel density), Mini DislayPort (means I can hook it up to my Apple Cinema display), Core i5 processor (let's hope it's a very power-frugal variety), and a 128GB solid-state drive.

And of course that 5mm-thick physical keyboard. 

 

To counter Surface, PC makers will engage in a lot of Windows 8 puffery about their ultracool convertible or touch-screen ultrabook. I don't know about you, but I need more than that to give Windows 8 equal time on my desktop.

OK, so Mac users aren't going anywhere and Windows 8 means diddly-squat (or worse) to them. But that's not Microsoft's objective. It simply needs to staunch the flow of defections to OS X and iOS.

Thus the June 15 Windows-8-plus-Surface pre-announcement. A soup-to-nuts hardware and software platform that is unmistakably Apple-like. And proposes to trump Apple and make Tim Cook eat his refrigerator-toaster analogy in the process.

The only remotely valid reason for Microsoft to abandon Surface is if it suddenly spurred HP, Asus, Acer, et al to design consumer devices that are cooler than Surface and go head-to-head with Apple.

Anyone out there think that's possible?

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57491412-92/to-fight-apple-flight-microsoft-must-hang-tough-on-surface/

Google exposes 'smart' results in search

SAN FRANCISCO -- Your search results in Google are about to get a big dose of Knowledge, the company announced today at a press breakfast at its San Francisco office.

Google's Knowledge Graph, its "smart" recognition of people, places, and things in search queries, is coming to English-language search results in a big way, starting with a rollout tomorrow.

Integrating the Knowledge Graph


The main component of the Knowledge Graph integration will be rolled out in parts, with all English-language searches getting the basic integration. This means that if you're searching for "Chiefs," for example, Google will prioritize your location. People searching from the United States will see the Kansas City Chiefs football team at the top of the results, while people searching from Australia will see the New Zealand rugby team.

But integrating the Graph into search is more than just location-aware searching, said Amit Singhal, the senior vice president at Google for Engineering Search.

"If we are to build the future of search, we have to solve the hard scientific problems of speech recognition and natural language understanding. We will have to build artificial intelligence. We're not there yet, but we're taking baby steps today," he said.

Those "baby steps" have so far involved 58 experiments, and more than 530 smaller changes to search. The Knowledge Graph integration is one of the first to go public, said Shashi Thakur, the Knowledge Graph team's technical lead. "We're using the knowledge base to build apps," he said, to give the database with more than 3.5 billion attributes and connections some real-world utility.

"You shouldn't have to be a mini-search engine before you search," said Singhal, and to that end the Knowledge Graph integration is meant to let a wider range of search queries find more accurate results than before. So, searching for "famous graffiti artists" is more likely to produce the results you're looking for than it used to. It will also suggest differentiated results as you type into the search box, so both choices for "Chiefs" will appear.

The Knowledge Graph results will appear to the right of the traditional search results, but when clicked they'll appear across the top. Visual components of the results, such as pictures, will appear as a horizontal scroll bar for easy navigation. Google demonstrated this working smoothly on both a traditional PC and a tablet.

Gmail comes to search


Also new to Google search is a Gmail "field test" that integrates Gmail search results with the Knowledge Graph, available now. Google is making this available to an even smaller subset of people -- U.S.-based Gmail users only. To activate it, you must opt-in at Google's registration site.

Once you're in, you'll get Gmail results in the same spot as the Knowledge Base when you query relevant terms. You can use the keyword "Gmail" with your query to get Gmail results -- when seeking package-notification e-mails from Amazon, for example, you can search on "Gmail Amazon."

However, you'll also be able to use more natural queries to bring up the e-mails you want to see. Type in "My Flights," and your upcoming flight itinerary will appear, complete with confirmation number and flight information such as number, time, and seat number. The feature will also leverage the Knowledge Graph so that a real-time update of the flight status appears, a quick way to check whether your flight has been delayed.

Sagar Kamdar, the director of product management for Universal Search at Google, explained that the Gmail integration is more limited because of the unique challenges e-mail presents. "Gmail is almost the same size as our Web corpus, and now you need to make it private and secure," he said.

That body of data is enormous, said Singhal. He cited 30 trillion URLs on the Web, as compared with 1 trillion in 2008, and on an average day Google crawls 20 billion of those.

The Gmail test comes with some rudimentary security controls. You can click a globe icon on the upper right of the results to hide results, and a human silhouette icon lets you restore them. Gmail will not appear in mobile search results yet, however, because of complications from implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the mobile Web. "It is coming," said Singhal.

Better search in iOS


And in a slight that's sure to irritate Android owners, the Google Search iOS app is getting the kind of voice integration that Google debuted in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean at Google I/O in June. This means that more-natural voice queries, such as, "What will the weather be like this weekend?" will return results that recognize your geolocation and tell you the upcoming forecast. If Google recognizes a direct result, such as when you ask it to solve a math problem, it will speak the result back to you as well as showing it in the app. The feature has not yet been made available to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

In the demo that Google's engineering director for Mobile, Scott Huffman, showed us, the voice integration worked most of the time, though it repeatedly struggled with differentiating "flight" from "flights" in a search for "When is my flight?"

The update to the Google Search app has been submitted to Apple, and Google expects it to be approved in the next few days, Huffman said.

Google has bigger plans for the integration of search into its other products, said Singhal, including Calendar and Drive, which he referred to as Docs. That minor and inadvertent slip nevertheless points up the struggle the company faces in forcing a deeper level of integration of its services without causing rebellion. While from a data perspective, it may feel natural to have all your data in one place, it's a big shift from how things are currently. And toggles or not, privacy experts are likely to be concerned about Google's stronger ties between personal data and global results. 

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57489395-93/google-exposes-smart-results-in-search/

 

iOS and OS X: Time for Some Real Convergence

OS X is great. So is iOS. But there's a certain disconnect between the two operating systems that feels very un-Apple-like. I'm ready for a better, more integrated convergence of the operating systems, something that lets me run all the same apps on the Mac as I run on the iPhone and iPad. Making Apple TV part of the mix wouldn't hurt, either. I'd like to see Apple really throw its weight around.

Lately I've found myself more frequently irritated and dissatisfied with my Mac than ever before. This is a weird feeling, made all the more powerful by the fact that Mac OS X Lion is the most useful operating system ever. With a simple two-fingered swipe on my Magic Mouse, I can flick my entire screen to a whole new desktop view, and with a swipe in the other direction, go back.

This feature alone is freakishly powerful for people who have a lot of different kinds of content on their Macs. It's an excellent way to focus, for instance, by leaving email back on another desktop so you can focus on a more important task.

Safari is also better than ever, letting me save groups of tabs (that feature took forever to arrive, despite other browsers having it), and I can now swipe with one finger on a Safari page to go back to the previous page. And it's fast

doing it.

The Mac App Store is bringing some really excellent applications front and center to Mac users, and I'm a big fan. I've already bought way more apps than I would have otherwise. Plus, I'm more willing to shell out a few bucks to experiment because I know exactly who is handling the transaction details.

The Mac App Store and iTunes finally have horizontal flickable elements built-in (again, with the Magic Mouse if you don't have a track pad), which is nice and intuitive. Back when Lion first came out and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) changed the scroll direction to mimic flicking a piece of paper around on a flat desk, I was having a hard time with the switch. Now, though, that action is so intuitive that I can barely use a PC or an older Mac running a previous version of OS X. The geniuses at Apple got that move right.

And Yet Something Is Wrong, Very Very Wrong

So the why the ongoing angst? If there's so much to love about my Mac, why am I irritated?

Mac OS X is not iOS. Or vice versa.

I'm so totally ready for a better, more integrated convergence of the operating systems that my teeth hurt from grinding them together.

First of all, there are great applications on my iPhone and my iPad. They've got nice clean interfaces, they are lightweight, they do just what they should and nothing more. I want them on my Mac -- the same interface, the same features. Sure, there are some companies that produce versions of their applications for the iPad and also for the Mac, but not enough. And they don't yet easily talk to each other to keep things in sync. With Apple's iCloud, there's a communication conduit just ready for this sort of thing.

Why can't I have the same weather, the same clock on my Mac as on my iPhone? These are simple things. With Mail, I can have essentially the same accounts on iOS as on my Mac, and they keep relatively in sync easily enough. But how about the awesome Reminders app on iOS? Sure, it integrates with my email and my Mac well enough, but there's no app for it. I can't, for instance, add or delete items on it with my Mac and keyboard; heck, I can't even open it up to look at it since it doesn't exist.

Instead, I have to understand how it connects with various applications under the covers, and that's not friendly at all. In order to work with Reminders, I have to hold my iPhone or tap away at it on my cradle next to my Mac's monitor. That's the opposite of elegance. Juggling devices. That whole issue is so un-Apple like. I might as well be controlling my TV and cable system with three different remotes.

Sure, some to-do applications have both iOS apps and Mac OS X apps, and they do a pretty good job of keeping them synced. But many of them suffer from either too much bloat or not enough power. Reminders hits the sweet spot.

So that's one nagging problem: There are lots of great apps for iOS that you simply can't run on your Mac.

The iPad Angle

This also goes with apps that were designed just for the iPad, which forces guys like me to pick either my iPad or my MacBook. Which one do I take with me? Or both? What's worse is when you do pick one then realize you really want to use an app that's only on the other device. Or you have to train yourself to use two different interfaces to accomplish essentially the same thing.

If this whole issue was focused on any company other than Apple, I wouldn't worry about it. It wouldn't cross my mind at all. Why? Because this kind of vision and integration is impossible for anyone else. It's not going to happen with Android and Linux and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows. OK, it might happen with Windows on the desktop and the smartphone, but it won't for a long, long time. But Apple, damn it, Apple can make the impossible seem possible. And as a loyal Apple buyer, I can start making connections.

Remember the famous Steve Jobs quote from years ago where someone asks him about not using consumer focus groups? His comment was something along the lines that consumer don't know what they want until Apple shows them what they want. Well, that was then. These days a good many consumers have some pretty good ideas about what they want.

Now that Apple has $97.6 billion in cash sitting around, I'm having a hard time seeing money as the challenge. I'd like to see Apple really throw its weight around and get some of these issues fixed.

I want a way to run an iOS app on my Mac. If that's a MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen ... perfect. If it's an iMac with a touch-sensitive screen, perfect. I should be able to seamlessly move from mouse to keyboard to touch ... all at the same time on my screen. If I want to flick my desktop to move to a new desktop, I ought to be able to do that by touching the screen too. Or my Magic Mouse.

And What About Apple TV?

Then there's my living room and my Apple TV. I love the thing, but it's maddening, too. It could so easily run apps that I don't understand why it doesn't. Oh, wait, it sort of does through AirPlay ... that's a great start. But again, why can't I have the same Weather application everywhere?

While where at it, why can't I have a Notification Center on my Mac? Notification Center, especially when you swipe down from the top of your iPhone, is awesome. Don't have it integrated with my Mac. And it's definitely not integrated with my Apple TV.

So what's my point?

Jobs and Apple dissed the fractured nature of Android with all the different devices and flavors, right? Well, it turns out that living in Apple Land isn't as seamless and integrated as it pretends to be. There's all sorts of ways that I have to have four different devices to get the kind of experience I want. And the user has to remember all these different devices, interfaces and passwords.


source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74273.html